Summer Writes: Week 9

Week 9 is upon us! Sorry to have been delinquent in adding my own goals to last week’s wrap-up post–I’m actually still trying to meet my goal for last week, which was my goal for the previous week, which is… a tad depressing. Don’t we all wish we were more like Anthony Grafton, cranking out 3,500 words in a morning? (h/t to Melanie) If competition is your thing, consider throwing your hat in the ring with one graduate student’s friendly contest to see if he can finish his dissertation before Grafton finishes his next book project. Tenured Radical (aka Claire Potter) is doing it–and so can you! The principle is not unlike the one that governs our twelve weeks–just set a goal and stick to it. And if you decide to partake of #graftonline, do be sure to let us know.

As always, here are your weekly goals:

Melanie: Write four lectures, work through newspapers, spend a day processing research–all building toward the goal of having a chapter draft by the end of summer.

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4 thoughts on “Summer Writes: Week 9”

This week I’m going to spend Friday at the Senate Library in DC, remembering to care about legislative history. I’m going to transcribe a bit. I’m going to sort through the stuff I got from these Cameroonian newspapers. And I’m going to plan a trip to New York for research at the Tamiment Library the week of August 19.

I realize that I haven’t posted in a couple weeks, but while this is not a great thing for our writing group, it actually means that I’ve been working really hard and meeting most of my goals. So, for the last couple weeks, I’ve done tons of research, gained confidence in the more tangential literature necessary to write this next chapter, and began to fill in my chapter outline with actual prose! The two best parts though, are that I think I actually figured out how to write my argument for this 3rd (and maybe 4th) chapter and I had an excellent morale boost meeting with my advisor.

So, while I’m still a bit panicked about meeting my overall summer goals (finish ch. 3/4, finish research through ch. 4/5, outline most of remainder of diss., and write general job application documents), I’m pleased with progress so far since this has definitely been my most productive summer in graduate school to date. Thanks, Dan and company!!!

I will try my best to be a better Summer Writes citizen from here on out!

P.S. Dan, when you go to France, how close will you be to either Bordeaux or Marseilles and how strong is your eighteenth-century French? 😉